20 February 2018

Aidan Nichols, Amoris laetitia, and Tucho

In his lecture on the current crisis in the Roman Magisterium, the full text of which, sadly, is not available, Fr Aidan Nichols justly oberved that the moral 'teaching' of Amoris laetitia, if not corrected, will "increasingly be regarded as at the very least an acceptable theological opinion. And that will do more damage than can easily be repaired".

In fact, the currently dominant tendenz has made no secret that this is precisely the plan: a plot to poison the very wells of magisterial teaching. As Archbishop Fernandez has publicly put it, "There's no turning back. If and when Francis is no longer pope, his legacy will remain strong. For example, the pope is convinced that the things he has already written or said cannot be condemned as an error. Therefore in the future anybody can repeat those things without being sanctioned".

There have been heretical popes in the past, but I doubt if there has often been a pope who (according to one of his closest collaborators and admirers) has cunningly plotted to enable heterodox teaching to erupt and flourish under his successor(s); and thus to undermine in advance the teaching of future popes. Strangling renascent orthodoxy before it has the chance to be born, if you will forgive my descent into rhetoric.

RichardT, Jeremy, I think ye miss an important point: the Enemy does not want us to Parrhesically speak or think or understand even a Consistent Single Error. He wants us, Pharisaically, to be unable to think or speak consistently, and so unable to have a consistent faith to live and enact. When we can think consistently and firmly, we can discover our errors and then correct them! So, the Enemy does not want us to be clearly decided in favour of any error. The whole idea is that persistent noise one way and the other leaves the "patient" in perpetual doubt about propositions, the very possibility of propositions, of decisiveness in action, of being Good, of even the possibility that God Is Good and so forth. Indeed you will find that Screwtape applies this very principle of deliberate confusion even to single words, such as "charity" and "christian". It would even be too kind to suggest that the Enemy wants us in chaos (though chaos would do): rather, he wants us reduced to spiritual mush.

In fact, Father, there has been a creeping establishment of a Neo-Magesterium for many decades. It got quite a boost from ambiguous language of Vatican 2. The ambiguities were then subsequently interpreted in heterodox ways. Then more and more heaped on until today we have diverse teaching all over the world. Heresy now falls under the sobriquet of "Church teaching" in many places with NOBODY to shut it down.

On top of this layer the new paradigm given the Church by Pope John XXIII who in his opening address to V2 told the world the Church would no longer condemn the bad but only affirm the good.

So we now have a culture in the Church whereby priests are formed to "do good" but not to aggressively combat evil. Names are never named. Heretics are not called out for being heretics. The old way, the way of Christ, the Apostles, the Fathers and the Church until V2 has been almost forgotten, and worse yet, is seen today as "uncharitable", as an evil in and of itself. If anyone doubts this, just condemn homosexuals using the language of the Church prior to Vatican 2. Describe Islam in the terms used before Vatican 2. Call for the conversion of the Jews as the Church did before Vatican 2. Give a full-throated slapdown to Martin Luther himself. Await the repercussions.

So I can very easily see future Popes being {self-}restrained by the errors of Bergoglio. In fact, it would be nothing new. Only possibly in degree, but not in essence of what we have seen for decades.

The Church desperately needs a truly Catholic Pope who will 1} act according to the full extent of his authority 2} re-introduce discipline and place under the interdict regions, and under the pain of excommunication and laicization many individuals.

ALL without regard for place, money, status and power of the Church.

Indeed, to borrow a term from Bergoglio himself, we need a true man of God in the papacy who is not afraid to lift up the "Church of the poor", for certainly many wealthy dioceses and even regions will resist and no doubt leave, calling themselves the "true church' just as the Protestants did.

I say let them go and pray for a Prodigal return. And let us get back to the work of brazenly and unapologeticaly bringing the Catholic faith to a lost and dying world.

What is forgotten is that there exists a 'liberal' or better still generous application of the existing annulment process. The Pope has indicated that as many as "fifty per cent" of marriages are invalid. Few would dispute his observation. There thus exists the potential to annul the majority of Catholic marriages. On top of which AL suspends the application of Our Lord's own words on the subject. I predict therefore that Pope Francis V in 2117 will simply annul Vatican II. It was nothing more than a shotgun ceremony hosted in an occupied and heavily indebted country. Some of the council's main protagonists came from another occupied country whose capital city had hosted the raping of 100,000 women less than twenty years before. A future canon lawyer will annul this council in less than ten minutes.

It is prolly the case that the vast majority of the prelature agrees with Our Pope and Our Cross; Bishop Emeritus Ratzinger surely agrees with him;

Benedict XVI: The conceptuality of St. Anselm has now become for us incomprehensible….

“Only where there is mercy does cruelty end, only with mercy do evil and violence end. Pope Francis is totally in agreement with this line. His pastoral practice is expressed in the fact that he continually speaks to us of God’s mercy. It is mercy that moves us toward God, while justice frightens us before Him.”

IF ABS is reading that correctly, Bishop Emeritus Ratzinger thinks that the Justice of God is cruelty.

Maybe that is the searched for key as to why the Roman Rite was destroyed. Maybe the revolutionaries did not believe in the Faith once delivered and so we could not be allowed the Roman Rite which clearly taught that The Holocaust/Sacrifice of the Mass was, in one aspect of it, a sacrifice of propitiation to appease God's Justice...

Well, if we have "deepened our understanding" that the Justice of God is cruelty then we really have "rethought" Justification (Sorry you big blue meanies at Trent) and so Francis is merely actualising the curious and captious "Faith" that has been slowly ascending for roughly a century and has now reached such a height that everyone all over the world can now see it in all of its brazen shiny gold colors.

Well, just because Pope Francis is convinced that what he's written and said cannot be condemned as error, that doesn't mean the Church cannot condemn them as error -- especially if they ARE in error. Though it may be too much to hope this would happen so soon after Francis no longer sits in St. Peter's Chair, nevertheless it is entirely possible and proper if Francis' immediate successor simply annuls all of his acts (such as the one in which his private letter was stuck into the AAS, and all of his modifications of canon law) and formally corrects and condemns the errors of Amoris Laetitia. The next pope could do it on his own divinely-granted authority or in concert with the bishops of the Universal Church in an Oecumenical Council. Let's not forget that Amoris Laetitia is merely an apostolic exhortation, of no dogmatic or juridical weight: it has no definitive or infallible teaching, and it changes no laws. None of the troubling words and actions of Pope Francis are irreformable or de fide -- indeed, the Holy Father and his collaborators surely know that if they attempted to binding the faithful to accept his ideas and policies as matters of infallible dogma, he would forfeit the Petrine Office. He would be daring the Church to condemn him formally as a heretic as we condemned Pope Honorius I as a heretic.

Isn't the cruelty referred to in the quotation that you provide the cruelty of humanity ?

"....But it is certainly not by chance that his last book, published just before his death, speaks of God's mercy. Starting from the experiences which, from the earliest years of life, exposed him to all of the cruel acts men can perform, he affirms that mercy is the only true and ultimate effective reaction against the power of evil.

Only where there is mercy does cruelty end, only with mercy do evil and violence end. Pope Francis is totally in agreement with this line. His pastoral practice is expressed in the fact that he continually speaks to us of God's mercy. It is mercy that moves us toward God, while justice frightens us before Him. In my view, this makes clear that, under a veneer of self-assuredness and self-righteousness, the man of today hides a deep knowledge of his wounds and his unworthiness before God. He is waiting for mercy....."

A question was asked of Pope Benedict prior to this section regarding the change in attitude of humanity with respect to their view of God. In Luther's time, there was fear of God's wrath, whereas nowadays humanity notes God's absence. Pope Benedict replied; "For the man of today, compared to those of the time of Luther and to those holding the classical perspective of the Christian faith, things are in a certain sense inverted, or rather, is no longer man who believes he needs justification before God, but rather he is of the opinion that God is obliged to justify himself because of all the horrible things in the world and in the face of the misery of being human, all of which ultimately depend on Him."

Your snippet regarding St. Anselm seems to me to be a false presentation of Pope Benedict's words. Pope Benedict understands St. Anselm quite well. It's those who hide their sins and want to demand mercy instead of admitting their sins who don't understand. People who hold God accountable and neglect to hold themselves accountable do not understand St. Anselm.

"Servais: When Anselm says that Christ had to die on the cross to repair the infinite offense that had been made to God, and in this way to restore the shattered order, he uses a language which is difficult for modern man to accept (cfr. Gs 215.ss iv). Expressing oneself in this way, one risks likely to project onto God an image of a God of wrath, relentless toward the sin of man, with feelings of violence and aggression comparable with what we can experience ourselves. How is it possible to speak of God's justice without potentially undermining the certainty, deeply established among the faithful, that the God of the Christians is a God “rich in mercy” (Ephesians 2:4)?

Benedict XVI: The conceptuality of St. Anselm has now become for us incomprehensible. It is our job to try again to understand the truth that lies behind this mode of expression. For my part I offer three points of view on this point:..."

Furthermore, Pope Benedict says: "a) the contrast between the Father, who insists in an absolute way on justice, and the Son who obeys the Father and, obedient, accepts the cruel demands of justice, is not only incomprehensible today, but, from the point of view of Trinitarian theology, is in itself all wrong. The Father and the Son are one and therefore their will is intrinsically one. When the Son in the Garden of Olives struggles with the will of the Father, it is not a matter of accepting for himself a cruel disposition of God, but rather of attracting humanity into the very will of God. We will have to come back again, later, to the relationship of the two wills of the Father and of the Son.....Let's place ourselves in front of the incredible amount of evil, violence, falsehood, hatred, cruelty and arrogance that infect and destroy the whole world. This mass of evil cannot simply be declared non-existent, not even by God. It must be cleansed, reworked and overcome. .......They also knew that in front of the excessive power of evil only an infinite love was enough, only an infinite atonement. They knew that the crucified and risen Christ is a power that can counter the power of evil and save the world. And on this basis they could even understand the meaning of their own sufferings as inserted into the suffering ..........But the Father himself, the God of the universe, he who is overflowing with long-suffering, patience, mercy and compassion, does he also not suffer in a certain sense? 'The Lord your God, in fact, has taken upon himself your ways as the one who takes upon himself his son' (Deuteronomy 1, 31). God thus takes upon himself our customs as the Son of God took upon himself our sufferings. The Father himself is not without passion! If He is invoked, then He knows mercy and compassion. He perceives a suffering of love ........So in a grand and pure way, one perceives there what God's mercy means, what the participation of God in man's suffering means. It is not a matter of a cruel justice, not a matter of the Father's fanaticism, but rather of the truth and the reality of creation: the true intimate overcoming of evil that ultimately can be realized only in the suffering of love.

As far as I can tell, both of the popes previous to Francis emphasize personal responsibility in one's life, in one's relationship with God - personal responsibility to follow the example shown to us by God the Son. In contrast, the current words out of Rome and Cambridge make it clear that there is no obligation to strive for divinity and that whatever a person decides that they want to do is "good enough" to warrant mercy from God and man - and humanity owes itself acceptance of mediocrity and sin with a pat on the back of "there, there, we understand. Don't worry, it's all good."

Fr John Hunwicke

was for nearly three decades at Lancing College; where he taught Latin and Greek language and literature, was Head of Theology, and Assistant Chaplain. He has served three curacies, been a Parish Priest, and Senior Research Fellow at Pusey House in Oxford. Since 2011, he has been in full communion with the See of S Peter. The opinions expressed on this Blog are not asserted as being those of the Magisterium of the Church, but as the writer's opinions as a private individual. Nevertheless, the writer strives, hopes, and prays that the views he expresses are conformable with and supportive of the Magisterium. In this blog, the letters PF stand for Pope Francis. On this blog, 'Argumentum ad hominem' refers solely to the Lockean definition, Pressing a man with the consequences of his own concessions'.